The killing of Trayvon Martin set off protests that grew over a decade and culminated with the global, massive “Summer of Protest” following the murder of George Floyd.
Martin was murdered by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood vigilante, in an apartment complex in Sanford, Fla.
The Curious Case of Trayvon Mart was a column I wrote for The New York Times at the time. For that column, Sybrina Fulton was Martin’s mother. I spoke to her by telephone. She was still shocked and disbelieving.
A few days later, activists organized the Million Hoodies March in New York on Wednesday. On Friday, President Barack Obama said that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. Fulton was interviewed in Miami the next day for another column.
This was when I saw in Fulton the first of many things I would see in “Mothers of the Movement”. These women were reluctantly made leaders, even though all they wanted was to go home and grieve.
Tamir Rice’s mother said to me, when I interviewed her for the first time, “I’m tired and overwhelmed and I just want go to bed.”
Or, as Sam DuBose’s mother said to me when she first met me: “All that I want is to close my door and cover it up and never open it again.”
These were the women who cried on their faces but had steel in their spines and insist that the world understand the enormity of the work done.
After George Zimmerman was acquitted of Martin’s murder, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was created.
It is all thanks to his mother. It was possible because of her determination and fortitude. Martin’s killer, like Till, was not convicted. The victory was not at the moment but in the near future. In America, something about both cases rang a bell.
Trayvon was not able to survive his encounter. However, his legacy of cries, whispers, and rallies survived. This new era in civil rights was renamed “before” and ‘after” by Trayvon Martin’s murder. The world was forever changed by the death of Trayvon Martin, the boy who wore a hoodie and carried candy.
